The Hindu Business Line : Toyota Motor Asia Pacific to control Toyota Kirloskar

MR ATSUSHI TOYOSHIMA (right), Managing Director, Toyota Kirloskar Motor, and Mr K.K. Swamy, Deputy Managing Director, at a press conference in Bangalore on Monday. — G.R.N Somashekar

Bangalore , Aug. 7

The Indian production operations of Toyota Kirloskar will now be directly under the control of Toyota Motor Asia Pacific Company based out of Thailand.

Expansion plans

In another development, Toyota Kirloskar is expected to increase its capacity by another 10,000 units next year as a part of its capacity expansion programme for production of its existing models. The expansion of the capacity may not involve further investments except for setting up of an additional paint shop. The existing capacity of the plant is 60,000, which will go up to 70,000 next year.

International operations

An official with the company told Business Line that apart from India, Toyota Motor Asia Pacific Company will support Toyota production operations in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan. The new company, which is a fully owned subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation in Japan, has been floated to strengthen the car maker's production and supply network through improvements in efficiency and speed of individual production companies.

Over a period of time, the new company is expected to assume the role of Toyota Motor Corporation, which from Japan has been supporting production, purchasing and logistics. The new operations complement the Singapore-based Toyota Motor Asia Pacific's role, which supports the carmaker's marketing and sales operations in Asia.

India-specific cars

With regard to capacity expansion, an official with the company said that Toyota would try to stretch the capacity of the current plant as much as possible before studying plans to set up another plant. There is a possibility that the new plant for production of small cars may be set up either towards the end of next year or the year after. The new car will be specific to India and Brazil and the work is on designing the model, sources said. Toyota Kirloskar has invested over Rs 1,500 crore in its plant in Bidadi near Bangalore. Toyota Kirloskar, which opened its third dealership in Bangalore on Monday, expects to sell 56,000 cars by the end of this year. This includes, 44,000 units of the Innova.

By next year, the company expects to sell between 4,500 units and 5,000 units of the Innova every month.

Toyota expects to sell around 2 lakh cars by 2010. The number of dealerships will also increase to 200 from 57 this year.

Between January and July, 2006, Toyota has sold over 22,700 units of Innova, 4,480 units of Corolla, 1,515 units of the newly launched sixth generation Camry and around 75 units of Prado.